Growth Mindset in ECS Classroom

I encourage my students to think outside the box and try new things. I give my students the freedom to explore the curriculum and to learn new coding practices and languages that are not necessarily a part of our regular curriculum. We use the Code Academy for almost everything as a result the students learned how to solve problems using different resources and techniques.

I already implementing growth mindset in my BIT courses. I believe I can add extra focus on growth mindset during the entrepreneur unit as students brainstorm products and services that can be useful in solving real life problems in their community. As previously stated, with more emphasis placed on the learning process and seeing how ideas progressively evolve, becoming more effective, students will feel a greater measure of success.

I love Dweck and have been incorporating growth mindset into my classrooms for years. I am very excited to see it implemented here!
With problem solving your first plan may not work. After evaluating, you may need to go through the process again, and again until you solve the problem.

I will use the growth mindset during problem solving by using the phrase “yet or not yet” instead of just “yes or no.” I want them to understand it is the process that is more important than the product sometimes.

I encourage outside the box thinking and explain to the students that making mistakes is part of the process and we need to learn by doing which includes working through mistakes to get better.

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Students are encouraged based on the process instead of the product. For example, when a student is working to solve something but not quite heading in the right direction, we may say something along the lines of, “Hey, that’s really good thinking you’ve got going on there. Have you also considered…?” Also, the amount of effort expended is valued more than getting the “right answer.” We say things in our classrooms like, “That took a lot of effort. I hope you are proud of the hard work you put into that project.” To add extra focus on the growth mindset during the problem solving unit, I will be reminding them that we are learning together and it is going to take effort, and we won’t always get it on the first try. It is okay to laugh at ourselves! We will accept failure as a part of the learning process; if we don’t fail, we aren’t trying hard enough.

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By demonstrating a growth mindset myself, this really helps implementing it in my classroom. We’ve jumped around somewhat since I’m integrating ECS into another course and we’re currently in Scratch. I’ve never used Scratch before so we will do the activities as a class. My students get a kick out of the aha moments I have but they’re are having them also.

I really like having Stem/Anchor sentences to help the students lead better discussions.

I tell my students that it is okay not to know all the answer at the beginning of the school year and at the start of a new topic. I tell them that they will now by the time they are done with the work. They are at school to learn and if they knew all the answers they would not be in school. I tell them they don’t know YET but they will have learned when the topic is completed.

Our school has been focusing on Growth Mindset the past two years. I’ve used it many times in working with middle school students. They tend to get frustrated easily and give up. GM enables a student to make mistakes and know that is ok. That mistakes are just part of learning.

I already incorporate Cooperative Learning, What I don;t Know is. I am going to teach the concept of Mindset, rate where they think their mind set is now–and why it’s there, and implement strategies that can be develop to increase mindsets

I do Lateral Thinking Puzzles as Warm Ups at the beginning of the class. At the beginning of the year I tell the kids that although these problems may at first appear difficult, we will learn how to solve them as the year progresses. I start with easy puzzles and model how to solve them. As the year progresses they get better and better at solving these puzzles. They get a participation grade for attempting them, and we keep track of their progress, so they can see how far they have come as the year progresses. To add extra focus to growth mindset during problem solving, we can track our success as we progress from the beginning to the end of the unit. As they get more experience in problem solving, they will be able to see how much easier to solve the problems as they become more adept at problem solving.

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I don’t use growth mindset but I am going to get the book so that I can start implementing it.

I always encourage my students to try their best and emphasize that effort is key to learning. I teach science primarily, so I always teach my students about all the fact that scientists make many trials of experiments / testing hypotheses before finding solutions (if ever). I stress that any information they learn in the process is still extremely important to their own learning and to others who may continue their work. Science continuously builds on the work done by others before them and it’s just as important to learn what doesn’t work as what does. I translate this idea to everything I teach and have students reflect on how their ideas have changed and the misconceptions they carried about a topic so they see how much they have learned.

Definitely! I am currently teaching code as an elective and students really struggle. They still have a great time though because as we learn, we share and they get so excited when they “teach” others something they figured out

I really appreciate the focus on science building on the work of others and how to learn from mistakes or build on what they have discovered. This will be helpful as they get into the Web Design and Programming units.

I think it is all about effort. If a student tries, I am happy. Problem solving and critical thinking are possible for all students. I am a life long learner and I stress that to my students and they know that I expect them to be learning every day! If you don’t ever make mistakes, you cannot learn. Learning from our past trials and tribulations is the best medicine!

I believe that proficiency based grading helps students see that its the learning process and not points in a column that is what is important. Rather than giving an accumulation of points, or allowing students to feel like they can never overcome some missing assignment or blown test, students should re-do work and re-take assessments to show that they do understand the material. Not that they just copy the work and turn it in, but that they have the opportunity to study again, try another method etc… and then try again. When students know that it isn’t a now or never approach to learning, they are more likely to stick with it.

I plan to enhance growth mindset for my students and myself. We all need encouragement from time to time to be resilient to keep love for learning growing.

@waldennt I agree that we can all use encouragement and support to enhance a growth mindset.